8 Steps to Build an App from Scratch.

Mobile uses taking over the desktop and thus the need of App Development. Today, there are more mobile users than desktop, just because of the ease and reach. As per the stats available on Statista, there were 6.8 billion mobile users in 2019, which is forecasted to reach 7.33 billion by 2023.

There are millions of apps running successfully and hundreds of app uploaded daily on different App Stores to target internet savvy audience with digital content that can be in their reach. According to the stats, around 70% searches performed on mobile and a smart phone user spent approx. 3 hour/day on different apps.

Apart from those stats, Smart Insight comes on a conclusion that Mobile users consume more than 2x minutes than desktop users and represented the information in an appealing graphic. As per the chart below, Argentina delivering the largest number of mobile minutes per user. Check more here,

After knowing the market demand, and user’s intention, being a business owner or an individual, there might be a thought strike on your mind to launch your own application. If yes, then you can build an app in just 10 steps from scratch.

8 STEPS TO BUILD AN APP FROM SCRATCH.

A successful application never built in just a single day, it requires in-depth research, complete focus, and eminent skills along with an audience centric promotional strategy. Here’s your how to guide of app development that will help you to build an application in just 10 App development steps.

Idealize the app Idea

Research the market & Competitors

List out the top features

Blueprint the rough idea

Initialize the UI/UX process

Highlight featured landing page

Initialize the app development

Test first, & submit it on app store

Idealize the app idea – Purpose & Objectives.

The very first step in this app development guide is to identify why you need an app or why your users will download the application. You have to idealize the idea and the objective of your application. Although, if you already have an app idea, you can move to the next step. Or if not, then you can explore more here.

Well, first of all keep it in mind that there’s no new idea that never being executed or idealize by anyone. If it strikes on your mind than foresure, someone else has already idealize it. There are 4 million plus apps available on Google and Apple App stores combined, and hundreds of app are removing daily.

So, keep it in mind that every new idea is a revolutionized version of an already existing application or a combination of two or more similar application. If you clear it in your mind you can think more creatively.

Research the market & Competitors.

After the first step, you surely got an idea about your next application that can be a market trend in future. But before that, you need to do an in-depth research about it. You can do it by exploring the similar kind of applications, market demand and user requirement.

Whenever you do research about the competitors, note down their app name, no of downloads, last update, publisher, features, and reviews. These things will help you to idealize how viable your idea is.

You also got the idea about the possible name of the application or got some common keywords that should be there. The details of publishers along with their active presence on user feedbacks will make you understand the user requirements. Even, you can use “sensortower.com” to identify the estimated downloads and revenue of any application without subscribing for a premium version.

These things will boost your morale and make you understand what required improvisations you need to follow after launching the application.

If you can’t find a competitor or any existing application, you foresure have a unique idea or might possible that the idea isn’t viable. So, initiate the blueprinting of the idea and try to deliver it to your close ones. Their feedbacks will clear your way and give you something that you haven’t thought about.

List out the top features.

Once you research your competitors and go through their ratings and reviews, you got to know the exact demand of users along with the app’s existing features. Although, if you have a unique idea, then you need to dream about it or need to think in different scenario to idealize most adapting features.

You don’t need to think about screen to screen, but you have to think about user need. For an example, if your idea is about dating, you need to write down the features like:

- User can create account using email or social accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)

- User need to link any social account to validate their identity.

- App should fetch details from social networks and allow users to moderate it manually.

- Users can view profiles, like pictures, post images, send requests and message directly.

- User can filter their interest and much more.

Try to find out the USP of your application that make a unique space for you in the market and present your application as a new one. Even, you can segregate your features into phases and launch a basic model with proper functionality. This will give you accurate feedbacks from targeted audience and allow you to improve it further.

With this segregation, you can release updated versions several times until you get a perfect product and decrease the chances of failure, which are higher when you launch a complete non-viable product after investing a lot of money.

So, first note down all the features, and segregate them into phases, but keep it in mind that the version 1 with minimum features still solve the problem of users.

Blueprint the rough idea

Now, you know what exactly you are looking and the features that should be there in the app. As a next step you have to think about the UI of your app and how users will interact with it. You can start sketching your ideas as only you can exactly illustrate how your app should look.

Well, before starting sketching, first segregate your features into different screens like- welcome screen, login/signup screen, main feature screen, sub feature screen, etc. This will make you more comfortable and more creative while illustrating your inception.

First start with the basic main screen of the app, which can show the general idea of the app and your brand. After then, move to the other screens, navigations, etc. Keep your app intuitive and easy to use. Remember, that’s a blueprinting stage and most probably you won’t get final layouts, but you will get an illustration that can be mold in the final designing process.

Initialize the UI/UX process

After blueprinting the mock-ups for your application, you will have the complete understanding of the app flow. Keep it in mind, that a successful app requires a great user interface that gives a great experience to the audience.

UI needs a high creative mindset and complete worktime to illustrate the final layout of the application. The beneficial part is that you already have the complete flow and now, you just need to bring your app to life visually.

Initialization will bring the rights to present your app flow in front of investors, or partners and developers will integrate the assets directly into the project.

Highlight featured landing page

After getting your app design done and before moving to development stage, first develop a featured landing page for your app, which highlights the major features, reveals why it is useful and showcase the app flow.

This will help you to target your audience, prepare a great marketing strategy and reach out to more users. The landing page should be concise, elegant, and highly expressive, because before the app it’s your point of contact and the ultimate destination of your user to learn more about the app.

The landing page is also useful to collect emails from the users, which can be later use in email marketing to target audience directly and make them aware about app launch, new feature or app uses. This step will also help you to understand the demand and feedbacks too. Don’t forget that there are millions of app available on app stores and blindly launching your app will cause the failure or slow reach.

Initialize the app development

We’re finally at the stage which lead us to the execution of our idea and after it we can have the live application. As we already did our groundwork and have a landing page along with the design flow of the app, now we need to finalize the platform either Android or iOS or we can go with the hybrid one.

For Native Android, we need to choose “Android SDK” while for iOS, we can go with “XCode or Swift”. Don’t think that app development means your work done. There’re more steps to go to get an eminent solution for your business.

Test, Submit and Market your App.

Now, it’s time to test your app, and personally I prefer to hire a professional quality analyst, who can test it in detail and make it more valuable for end user. Although, you can share your app with your colleagues, friends and relative ones to get their feedbacks.

Once you done with the feedbacks received in the testing phase, implement them and then submit your app on leading app stores like if your app is in Android, submit it on Google App Store and if it’s in iOS, submit it on Apple iTunes.

Hoorrayyyy! You have launched your app successfully, now it’s time to market your app and get enough users. Although, you have already done pre-launch marketing through your landing page and hope so, you get enough email data as well. You can use app store optimization, email marketing, Digital Marketing, Search engine optimization, influencer marketing and other major forms of marketing to market your app.